Brettia

As some may know, I’ve been working for Trapani since October of last year, and back on Thursday I started working with him at the school again, but for many more hours. I was perfectly ready to work diligently for two or three hours, but this quickly became five hours, and by the time I was home, I was ready to flop down on the couch and read something. That something ended up being the fourth Harry Potter book, which happened to be the first thing I saw. More on that later.

Anyway, I was pretty tired Thursday, and we had had a long and somewhat frustrating chat about how the school website should be run and such, so I wasn’t entirely happy about the whole thing, either. On Friday the school was closed, and I got to spend my day off cleaning house without my little brother’s help (he was off at a friend’s house sleeping over). Woo. I forget if I talked about all this already, but bear with me.

Saturday was okay, or at least it must have been, because I no longer remember what occurred that day anymore. Sunday, however, was a bit more exciting, as my family and I went to a church potluck to say goodbye to the outgoing pastor, a big, friendly man named Doug. (We all just call him Pastor Doug, though he does have a last name, I think.) The food was good, and Zachary (my brother) street-luged down the church’s driveway on his skateboard. He almost crashed when shooting a narrow gap between cement barriers, but he made it, much to my disappointment. No, I didn’t really want him to lose his teeth in a tragic skateboard accident, but he’s been increasingly annoying lately while I have (in my opinion) antagonized him less often than usual. It’s a bit one-sided, since we usually feed off of each other’s taunts and pranks, but I find that I don’t really care anymore about revenge.

On Monday it was back to work, but this time, doubly so. The family friend, the one who owns a golf business, called and asked that I come over and fix their computer, which was generating dozens of pop-ups per hour and becoming an increasing burden. I agreed (for a price) and was picked up around 9:30. I worked steadily on the problem until about 1:45, using such various weapons in my anti-spy/ad/malware arsenal as Ad-Aware, Spybot Search and Destroy, and Norton Anti-Virus. Finally, everything seemed to be in working order: Ad-Aware and Spybot had taken out about 900 infected objects among them, and Norton had discovered a Trojan virus (one that acts like a legitamate program, and is not at all affiliated with the famous product which I won’t name).

Norton was unable to clean the virus in the beginning, but it did it without any problem once the spyware/adware/malware were gone. I ran LiveUpdate, the Norton virus definition list updater, and was asked to reboot the computer. This seemed normal, so I rebooted. However, what occurred after the reboot was anything but normal. The Windows XP setup program came up, asking me to enter information that the computer should have had already. I complied, faced with no other option, and went through the entire setup program. After clicking Finish, the computer sat and thought about things for quite a long time, and the friend and I were beginning to get nervous. He suggested that I call HP (the maker of their computer), and I did.

While I was on the phone, the computer did whatever it was doing and went to a countdown screen, where it stated that if it was restarted before the ten-minute countdown was over, something (who knows what) would go horribly wrong. And at that exact moment, a voice on the phone (prerecorded) came on, and the elevator music stopped for a moment. It said something to the effect of: if you’re calling about a new virus that displays a countdown screen, go to the HP website for more information, or stay on the line if you don’t have Internet access. The elevator music continued, and it was then obvious that I wasn’t likely to speak with a human anytime soon. I hung up, and we let the countdown continue and finally finish. The computer finally got to the desktop, but all the settings were messed up, and it took the friend six hours on Tuesday to get his email back in order. Luckily, no files seemed to be missing or out of place.

The scare was over, but it still left behind some nasty problems. We assumed that the whole thing was caused by the Trojan virus that we’d found earlier, and that somehow Norton had triggered somethng when it tried to remove it. I needed to get over to CSHS at this point, so it was agreed that I would come back on Tuesday, and that Ray would call or pick me up at 8:00.

I finally made it to CSHS at about 2:30 that afternoon to be greeted by about ten pages of a packet that needed to be scanned and PDF-ed. (In other words, painstakingly scanned using the lab’s ten-year-old scanner and then touched up and rerendered using Macromedia Fireworks MX, then finally exported as a grayscale JPEG and imported into a Word document, which was finally converted to PDF.) This in itself took most of the afternoon (at least until 3:30 or 4:00), and I had to wait longer while a teacher (Metcalf, I think, though I really don’t know teachers very well beyond those that I’ve already had) printed some document or another. Then Trapani had to do some things, and I had to wait longer. Normally, I wouldn’t have minded much, as I have nothing better to do, but the frustrating events of the morning had taken their toll on my mood.

I arrived home tired and ready to read some more, which I did.

Tuesday was worse than Monday, at least in the morning. The family friend that I’ve mentioned has a knack for not coming at the right time, and it was more than proven on Tuesday and today as well that he still has that knack. I was ready to go at 7:30, after having stayed up until 12:30 the night before, engrossed in the Harry Potter book (they’re really addictive, even if you don’t like them all that much). Sleep-deprived and still tired from working so much over the past few days (it might not seem like much to someone who has a job, but for me, having never had to work steadily for so long, it was exhaustive), I awaited a call from the family friend or the sound of a car in our driveway, come to pick me up. I waited. And waited. And soon it was after 9:00, so I called the family friend myself. No answer, at either of his numbers. Feeling cheated of a solid night’s sleep, I flopped down on the couch and dozed until Trapani came to pick me up and take me to CSHS.

Once there, I was greeted with a mountain of things that needed to be put on the website. For a brief moment, I felt like a secretary, but then I decided that what I was doing would free up Trapani, which would in turn be beneficial for me, so I set to it. It took about an hour and a half, but I got it done, and the homepage got a little reorganization as well. We talked some, and I worked on fixing a weird network glitch that was causing the desktop to turn off and on when someone was logged in, and I got home at about 5:00 again, still tired from not having enough sleep the night before.

The family friend had called just before I left for CSHS, apologizing for “forgetting” to call or come and get me, and asking that we do the same thing again today (Wednesday). With several promises that he would indeed pick me up, I agreed. So I was now obligated to get up at 7:15 again in order to shower, dress, and eat breakfast in time to call the family friend at 8:00. I read my Harry Potter book for about three hours Tuesday night, blazing through a solid 300 pages. I fell asleep around midnight, and I woke and got ready at 7:15, as planned. I called at the correct time, got no response, and called again fifteen minutes later, and again fifteen minutes after that. Never was the phone answered, though I was sure that one of the two numbers that I tried each time had to be right. At this point I was feeling thoroughly nettled, and so I called Trapani and said that I wouldn’t be coming to the school in the afternoon.
I didn’t exactly tell him why, but I did need to get some things done, as well as figure out if my web design client (the main source of most of my work, and incidentally Trapani’s brother) had forgotten about me or not, as I hadn’t heard from him in days. I still haven’t talked to him; more than likely he’s a bit annoyed at me because I’ve been gone so much lately and have been unable to return any of his calls. I finished my Harry Potter book this afternoon (734 pages in about eight hours, a personal page per hour record), during which time the family friend finally called. I let the answering machine get it, as I wasn’t particularly willing to talk to him at that point, and he said something about forgetting all about me and so on. I find it hard to believe that he didn’t remember until almost five hours after the appointed time.

And that brings me to where I am now, sitting in my black leather office chair, typing rapidly. I’ve been more eloquent today than usual, a side effect of blogging right after reading a book, as I have a tendency to copy the tone and style of an other I have recently read for a few days after finishing the book. Not entirely a bad thing, unless the author is a bad writer, in which case it sucks.

As you can see, the fates have transpired to make the first three days of this week suck royally. The fact that I’m ever-tired (reminds me of Everfresh…) is not because the work I’ve been doing was particularly strenuous or hard, or because I’m a spoiled middle-class American who’s never worked a day in his life, but because I find no value in the jobs I’ve been given. How can anyone consider making PDFs and updating an ugly website something to take pride in? How can anyone consider fixing someone’s computer without success and then being blown off by them something to take pride in? But then comes the hardest question to ask: if I could choose any job in the world, which one would I be most proud of having?

Certainly not President of the United States, which is probably the first thing to come to mind. Our political system is so screwed up with corruption and greed that I’d never want that job. CEO of a Fortune 500 company? Sounds great, but again, greed and corruption comed to mind. IT department director for a large company (or my school district, even)? No, I don’t want to spend my life in a server closet. Writer? Now there’s a better one. People don’t realize how hard it is to write something entertaining and of good quality at the same time…it takes a specific kind of person. Am I that kind of person? Who knows?

And there’s only one other job that comes to mind: owner of my own small web design/development firm. That sounds great, but how much time would I really have to work with clients? Then again, if the firm consisted of only one employee, myself, then I guess I’d work with clients no matter what. But do I really want to have anything to do with computers? As I see it, computers and the Internet are nothing: just air, electrons, bits of metal. They’re not real people. They’re just a fake world for real people to fall into, and possible become trapped in. That’s why you see so many gamer-geeks and programmer/computer nerds like myself. What would these kids do if they didn’t have technology? Play sports? Not likely. Read books? Maybe. Do nothing? Probably.

Though it may not seem so, I actually have some kind of plan in place before I write a blog entry. This isn’t all just a long stream of thoughts, though it does look like it is. Lately I’ve been thinking about philisophical things like the place of humans in the universe and where I fit into all that and such. For some reason, the Harry Potter book that I just read gave me the idea of starting with the basics, rather than trying to figure everything out at once.

First, one needs something to strive for, some kind of uber-long-term goal to try and reach before they die. For many people this might just be to have children and raise them. For others this might be to conquer the earth. And I have no idea what mine would be, which is why I’ve felt so adrift lately. This is not to say that I don’t want to have children or conquer the earth (heh), but rather that I regard other things as more important. (Then again, I’ve never done either, so who am I to judge?) To figure out my ultimate goal(s), I have to assess what is important to me, right? And what is important to me? Things like honor, friendship, loyalty, honesty, strength of character, etc. But what about material things? My cat. My family. My friends, of course.

But how do I somehow go from that to some kind of life-long ambition? Unlike Harry Potter, my parents weren’t killed by some power-hungry madman when I was a year old, so I don’t have anyone that I want to kill or take vengeance upon. I was never wronged by society, so I have nothing against the world. I’m not poor (or rich), so what reason do I have to strive for wealth? Is is possible that my generation (at least those who are American) are so pampered and sheltered that they have no experiences early in their lives to drive them forward in adulthood? My parents were both born to poorer families, and they have worked hard to have more money to provide for their own children than their parents had for them. To me, this makes sense: my parents don’t want my brother and I to have to work like they did when they were kids.

But what if, by trying to give to me what they never had, my parents are also cursing me with a life that is too easy? It must sound stupid, to complain of having things too easy, when others are living on the streets and going hungry and would give anything to trade places with me. However, what if these people are actually better people on the inside than any pampered American brat, because they’ve been through an ordeal so tough that they know what it’s like to feel real hunger and real pain. I’m not saying that living on the streets without food or shelter or adequate clothing is the key to becoming a better person…but who knows? It might be.

Supposedly Buddha (Siddhartha Gautama) was originally a rich prince with everything he could ever want at his disposal, but he gave it all up in order to travel his country and think and fast. And it worked for him. But wouldn’t it be ungrateful to give up riches and fame like he had, especially when others are working so hard just to get a fraction of that wealth? Or perhaps relinquishing his wealth was a way of trying to get people to see that it doesn’t matter, that it isn’t worth it, that they won’t be content, no matter how rich they are.

Satyagraha.

I just saw a web design company with hourly rates as high as $120/hour! Does anyone else think that’s unbelievable? How can they even charge that much without driving customers away? I only charge $15/hour for simple HTML/graphic design, and $20/hour for complicated HTML/PHP. Am I really that cheap? Or is this particular company just really expensive?

There was also a list of design packages, one of which was very similar to the website I recently did for my aunt and uncle (feature-wise and such). The package was listed for $650, including costs incurred for web hosting and a domain name (only about $75). I charged my aunt and uncle $100, for a net profit of about $50. Sure, they got heavy discounts for being relatives, but still…my price is less than 20% of what Keystone Websites, the company I discovered, was charging. Am I cheating myself by offering my services so cheaply?

The problem is, I have no way of gauging where my prices should fall. I’ve never had a real job before, hourly or anything (being only 14, a job can be hard to come by). So how am I supposed to know what to charge people? I know that wages for clerks at Osco Drug stores in California start at $17.00/hour because of high cost of living. Does that mean I should charge more than $17/hour for even basic work? Designing and building web pages is certainly more strenuous and requires much greater skill than simply scanning items over a red laser.

Another problem is that most of my clients have no appreciation of higher-level site design. A friend of the family who runs a golf business generally can’t seem to accept that sites can look good without looking as if they were made by a seven-year-old. So whatever I design for him has to be “dumbed-down” a bit. Meaning that I’m not using my more advanced knowledge, meaning that I have to charge less. The same thing happens when dealing with another client, who uses me to design websites for his design company when he is flooded with work. He uses Dreamweaver for everything, and wants me to do the same. Though he’s a nice guy and easy to talk to and get to know, he can’t accept that my way of doing things generally will generate more detailed, pixel-perfect layouts as a result. It’s all in the control the developer has over their code, and Dreamweaver and FrontPage don’t give me nearly enough control for me to be happy. For this client my rates are low too, since I don’t feel comfortable with charging him much for work that I myself am not satisfied with.

I don’t want to scare people away by raising my prices, nor do I want to feel like I’m swindling them. It would be nice to have enough money for my dream computer after only two or three sites, but I don’t know how I’d be able to bear looking at it, no matter how pretty it might be, if I have it only because I took too much money from people who didn’t know the business well enough to know that they were being overcharged.

Computer Fund

And here’s my latest earnings report:
Current Holdings: $302.08
Accounts Receivable: $738.50
Earnings Between Now and My Birthday: $310.00
Earnings Between Then and August 16: $320.00
Estimated Total By Summer End: $1,750.08
Realistic Total: $1,350.08

Have you even been hurtling forward through life only to stop short suddenly and wonder why you’re blindly doing what you’re doing? Sometimes I wonder, if I were just more…normal, what things might be like. Who would I be, what would I be doing, and most importantly, would I be happier? My first thought: probably not. My second thought: maybe. Lately I’ve felt increasingly antisocial, and though I know I’m not totally hopeless (I have friends, and such), this being out of school thing is not helping. I remember being so happy on the last day of school, joyful and exultant, ready to leave the forsaken campus for three whole months of peace and relaxation. Little did I know that these three months of peace and relaxation would be spent mostly alone or with my younger brother, who just watches TV and plays the PS2 and nothing else.

Not only that, but I’m also faced with a severe lack of something to do. I’m the kind of person who always needs something to work toward, some kind of purpose or goal to strive for. Right now, I have no purpose and no goal. It’s like floating around in the North Atlantic with only a pink floatie to keep you from drowning. I want to cast off the embarrassing floatie and try to save myself, but I risk dying (or failure) by doing so.

When I say that I have nothing to do, it’s not that I just sit around all day and stare at the wall. It’s that I have nothing to do that’s worth doing. Sure, I can keep building websites for Jim (Trapani), earn some more money, hopefully get a nice new computer someday. But do I really even want one? Isn’t the computer the whole reason for my crappy social life in the first place? I guess everybody ends up having a job that takes up a lot of their time at one point in their high school life, but I’m starting about a year and half earlier than everybody else. Maybe I should just figure out how much money I’d make with a normal part-time job in a restaurant for three years, and then try to earn that much through my current job. After that, quit. Then I’ll be breaking even with less work. But what would I do after that?

The problem is, without computers and stuff, I have no other skills or hobbies. I don’t play any sports, and I’m too out-of-shape and unskilled to start playing one now. I’m a good student, and I’m great at schoolwork and stuff, but that gets old too. To me it seems like I am skilled at everything that has nothing to do with other people, and I suck at everything else. Truthfully, it’s not that people don’t like me, or that they’re jealous of my academic successes (some are, but they just joke about it), it’s that people only like me to a point. We’ll talk and joke and goof around at school, but I’m not invited to do anything outside of school, and for me to invite someone else to go do something would just be…wrong. So I end up sticking around with the two best friends that I’ve known since 6th grade, Jim and Dylan. I’d hang out with Tyler too, but the general animosity between Jim and Tyler sort of messes that up.

All I can say is that the next three years are pretty much the only time I have left before I’m considered an adult, before I have to worry about myself even more than I do already. Those three years could be the best or the worst of my life, depending on how I use them. I just have to change myself, mold myself into something that I want to be, rather than something that I wanted to be. Just figuring out exactly what that something that I want to be is will be the hard part.

But even if I succeed at this “remodeling” of myself, what about later? Where will I end up? What do I actually want to do with my life? I mean, I don’t even know what career I want to pursue. Probably something technology related, but I’m not sure. Sometimes I have to admit that I really despise technology. I can see what it’s doing to us (mankind), how it destroys our planet, how it destroys our species. But I don’t want to be a treehugger, either.

This was actually a topic of discussion between Jim and I (isn’t it weird how when you say “Jim and I” out loud it sounds like “Gemini” (which happens to be my astrological sign)) a few months ago during a particularly boring PE class. The main theme of the conversation was how humans were headed for sure destruction if we didn’t do something to curb our exploitation of our planet soon. I don’t think I actually said it aloud, but I began to wonder: if technology is so bad, if by expanding our knowledge of the universe and moving forward scientifically, we (humans) are killing our planet, why were we ever allowed to get beyond the Stone Age anyway?

It almost seems like intelligence is more of a curse than a blessing. Perhaps if we were more responsible, then we could manage to peacefully coexist with nature, but I can’t see that ever happening. But why are humans intelligent if our intelligence will kill everything around us? Why should we even try if the wonders that we create are nothing compared to the natural wonders that we destroy? Is the real meaning of life just that: that no species was ever meant to have our intellect and power over others, and that none ever will again? Is humanity just some sort of biological mistake, an experiment gone horribly wrong?

But these theories concentrate on the bad parts of human nature, not the good. Without us, there would be no love, no emotion, no thought, no reason. These are the qualities that make us unique and that allow us to appreciate what is around us. But without humans, there would be no need for those qualities, because there wouldn’t be anyone around to understand them, right? If a tree falls in a forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound?

My old computer, Crampy, was on its last legs on Monday. I was having problems connecting to my web server, I couldn’t receive email, it was slow(er), I hadn’t been able to play DVDs in forever, and my video card drivers were out of date because I couldn’t seem to get the new ones to install. Now, however, after seven hours of installation and tweaking, everything is back to normal. And it’s so much faster! Unbelievably fast, in fact. I love it! It’s amazing how much better things will run when you don’t have old settings and files from 34,159,265,358 programs cluttering everything up.

One suggestion for anyone who reimages their PC: back up EVERYTHING! When you delete all partitions with fdisk and hit enter after typing format c:, everything will be gone! Some people don’t seem to realize that. I backed up everything, from the contents of my htdocs directory on my development webserver to everything in My Documents to my iTunes music. Compressed, it barely fit on two CDs, which, incidentally, was all I had. I got lucky, I guess. But it looked like my luck would run out when the reimaging program provided by HP started spewing out errors about bad files and CRC checksum inconsistencies. I just about had a heart attack, fearing the worst: that the reimaging would fail and I’d be left with a DOS prompt. I tried everything, and nothing worked. Just as I was about to give up, I was suddenly inspired to take the recovery CD out of the drive and check the bottom to see if it was scratched. There were no scratches, but there was a large ball of lint or dust stuck about halfway between the rim and the center. No wonder the drive couldn’t read the files! I breathed a sigh of relief and plunged onward.

Once the HP stuff was done, Windows 98 did its configuration stuff and I was finished with the first part of my journey. Next I uninstalled all of the crappy bundled programs that HP “provides” (perhaps “curses” would be better) users with. With that finished, I began the installation of Windows XP Home, which took about two hours, one conversion from FAT32 to NTFS, the deletion of Windows 98, and three reboots. Then I ran Windows Update and got XP Service Pack 1, which required another reboot. I installed the remaining updates, Windows Media Player 9 Series, the .NET Framework 1.1, and various smaller updates, which required two more reboots. Finally, I was able to install Office 2003 and Visual Basic .Net Standard (which is still installing now). That was the end to my Microsoft products.

Now I downloaded Firefox and Thunderbird from Mozilla.org, installed and configured them, and downloaded extensions and themes for them. Next was iTunes, and I copied my settings, library data files, and my songs over from a back up CD. I also copied the stuff from My Documents back to where it needed to be, and I restored my usual desktop wallpaper, video settings, and resolution. Then I installed WinZIP, WordWeb Pro, and What Pulse (the three Ws). I read a few websites while doing this and came upon a beta version of Windows Media Player 10, which I downloaded and installed as well.

With most of the major stuff done, I moved on to the development environment. I installed Apache 2.0.49, MySQL 4.0.20a, and PHP 4.3.6, along with phpMyAdmin 2.5.6. Crimson Editor and FileZilla soon followed, as well as Paint Shop Pro 8.1 and Photoshop CS (trial version). I also installed IMTranslator, a free English < => Spanish translator from Paralink. And now…I’m done. Whew.

A Listing of Programs I Have Installed

Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition SP2 Build 2042

This is a beta edition of XP SP2 (service pack 2) which is not freely available to the public. However, you can find it on various warez sites and IRC channels with enough searching (though I am a legitimate beta tester).

Microsoft Office 2003 Professional

I was able to get a single-user license for Office 2003 for only $20. Not amazed? You will be when I tell you that the normal price for this license is $500. Yes, $500. Definitely more than anyone should have to pay. You can get the student and teacher edition for $150, though, but it’s still not as good as Professional. The reason I got such a steep discount is because my mom’s company, Albertsons (without the apostrophe), was nice enough to provide a home use program through Microsoft for its employees so that they could work at home more easily. I think it was intended more for people who didn’t have Office at all (I had Office 2000 before), but I read the license agreement and I suppose I’m okay.

Mozilla Firefox

I know I plug Firefox every fifteen seconds, but I only do it because it helps me in two major ways. First, it warms my heart to know that I’m making a difference and saving them the hassle of popups and rogue ActiveX controls and viruses that comes with using Internet Explorer. Okay, so I don’t really care about how positively it impacts the life of the converted IE user, but I do care about the fact that Firefox’s Gecko rendering engine renders (X)HTML 31415% better than Internet Explorer’s. Because Firefox is almost completely standards-compliant, I rarely have to worry if code will display correctly in it. I have to worry about how IE will handle it with every change I make to a page because IE has a tendency to randomly position items however it wants. For a web designer, this can mean hours of debugging, and this is only for the latest version of IE, version 6. Earlier versions and the Macintosh version all have different quirks, making some features impossible to implement. With this blog, I haven’t tested the code in IE at all. If you care enough about the layout to be annoyed when it displays badly in IE, then you can download Firefox for free from the convenient link at the top of the page and be absolved of your sins against the web developer community.

Mozilla Thunderbird

After a brief period of time using Outlook 2003, I recently switched back to Thunderbird because it just works better and faster. I don’t need Outlook’s calendar and tasks and journaling features, and it’s junk mail filter kind of sucks compared to Thunderbird’s. Also, Thunderbird is a companion product to Firefox, which makes it even better.

Crimson Editor

Though not well known, Crimson Editor is the perfect lightweight, multipupose editor for any kind of programming, be it for the web or for the desktop. It also has built-in FTP editing support, so you can edit files on a remote web server as if they were on your computer, which is a nice feature that you don’t see much in other programs.

iTunes 4.5

Just download it. That’s all I can say. Just get it, install it, and be amazed at its sleek beauty and impressive playback quality (though songs are only 128kbps quality, and I would prefer 160kbps). Then there’s iTMS, the iTunes Music Store, which has over 500,000 tracks for downloading at 99 cents each. They don’t have everything, but they do have most of the music that’s worth buying.

Xteq-Dotec X-Setup 6.6 Pro

X-Setup is a tweaking program for Windows that lets you change settings that are not normally available for the changing. Most of the settings only make sense to advanced users, so I would recommend TweakUI or TuneXP instead if you are afraid that you’ll mess something up.

Tweak UI / PowerCalc

Tweak UI is a nice little program released by Microsoft as a Windows XP powertoy. It is very much like X-Setup, though it lets you change less features, and only those that are approved by Microsoft. PowerCalc is another powertoy that gives you a full-featured graphing calculator to replace the normal Windows calculator. (Very helpful for algebra :D)

TuneXP 1.5

TuneXP is another tweaking program distributed by driverheaven.net. It contains settings and optimizations not found in X-Setup or TweakUI, some of which increase speed considerably. It also comes with helpful documentation to keep you from enabling a tweak that shouldn’t be enabled.

FileZilla

FileZilla is a free, open-source project hosted by SourceForge. It is a very robust FTP client similar to WS_FTP or CuteFTP, but free. (Note the running “free” theme here.)

IMTranslator

This program is VERY useful when it comes to translating words and phrases. It supports several languages, but I use it most for translating words from English to Spanish and back. Definitely worth getting for any student enrolled in a Spanish class.

Paint Shop Pro 8.1

This is a great program with a somewhat cheesy name. It’s no Photoshop, but it still does a very good job when it comes to simpler photo-editing tasks. I think it actually does vectors and paths better than Photoshop 7 does, though I haven’t checked to see if Photoshop CS has been improved in that area.

Photoshop CS

Here is the grand-daddy of all graphics programs. If you want to do something with an image, Photoshop can do it. All you have to do is know how, which is the hard part. The $650 fee to buy it is steep, but all professional-grade programs are like that. Besides, students can get it for the low, low price of $260.

Microsoft Visual Basic .NET Standard

Normally priced at about $100, I got this program for free by filling out response forms and watching a few online movies on Microsoft’s MSDN site. I don’t know if I’ll ever use it, but it was free!

Apache 2.0.49

With a 70% market share, Apache is by far the most popular server package on the Internet. Even better, it’s free too. It comes preinstalled with most Linux distributions, or you can download the Windows version from their website.

MySQL 4.0.20a

This is the latest version of the MySQL database server, one of the fastest in the world, though it is somewhat lacking in features compared to PostgreSQL. MySQL has been known to outperform such corporate heavyweights as Oracle 9i and Microsoft SQL Server. Not bad, considering it’s free.

PHP 4.3.6

PHP 4.3.6 is the latest stable version of the PHP interpreted scripting language, which is what I use for my various projects. It also powers this blog, which is run using WordPress.

This is probably not everything, but it’s most of it. Just Google the name of the product if you want to download it; I don’t have the time to go find all the links right now (maybe later).

QuickTip

If you just can’t find that old video game in stores, check Amazon. I recently hunted about for Heroes of Might and Magic III (a very popular game back in 1999), and could find it nowhere. Amazon had it, and I got it for only $12 plus shipping and handling, whereas Dylan got it at EB Games (he got the last copy there) for $15. Not bad, eh?

“I’ve been whorepooned!” - Dylan, accidentally mispronouncing “harpooned.” Don’t ask.

I used to look forward to weekdays as if they were holidays. Now, they’re just days when my parents are home, and I can go do things. This is a double-edged sword, however, because the freedom to do things comes with the threat of possible enslavement to do tasks such as cleaning stuff and weeding things and moving random objects around. The work isn’t really as bad as it may seem; it just feels that way because I’m not used to having to do much manual labor. My physical movement is normally reduced to typing and getting up once in a while to get a drink or do some chore or eat lunch. At least my fingers are strong and nimble.

Friday was the dentist appointment, where I had some of the remnants of crud that my braces left behind cleaned off. My teeth are now 22.3141592653589% better looking, though I doubt anyone will notice. After the appointment, which amazingly took only about 20 minutes, (usually there’s an hour wait followed by an agonizing hour of sitting bored in the Chair), my brother and I were conscripted to work in the garage with my mom, where we threw out old things that we’d had since living in Salt Lake along with the garbage and boxes that had accumulated since moving to Phoenix.

Garage-cleaning on a 100-degree day is hot, unhappy work, and we were happy to jump in the pool after we were finished. The rest of the day was spent vegetating on various couches and playing video games.
Saturday was much more exciting, since I went over to Jim’s house in the afternoon to hang out and possible sleep over. Dylan came too, and we ended up in Jim’s swimming pool for four hours, beating eachother to death with foam noodles. This was not some simple, benevolent, soft hitting that was going on here. Jim was declared Holy Emperor of the pool because he wielded the Golden Noodle, and Dylan was declared a heretic for stealing and then wearing a holy relic, the Face-Mask of Extreme Nerditude. I was the embodiment of a hurricane, taking two noodles and whirling them about fast enough to knock someone out with a good hit. I was also known as the Smurf and the Pink Menace because of the color of my noodles.

I won’t go into the details, except that there were many coup d’etats and angry assaults upon the Papal Realm, but it was certainly fun. At the end, exhausted and beated, we crawled inside to change. Then Jim started up his computer and we played Heroes of Might and Magic III in multiplayer mode. Generally, the object of the game was to build up a town and collect resources with your knights and their armies. After pillaging your lands, you had to invade someone else to gain more, until you had conquered all the towns. It was quite addictive, and we played from 8:00 until 5:00 AM, when we decided to go to bed because Dylan had to practice at the golf course at ten. Sleep really didn’t work, but we did end up getting three or four hours worth in the end.

Dylan left at 10:30, and Jim and I continued to play HMMIII until I left at 1:30. Before leaving I glanced at the trash can where we had been throwing away our soda cans during the night, and I was shocked to find that there were at least 15 cans in there. No wonder my hands were shaking.

Even after the happy little sleep-over, the weekend wasn’t over yet. On Sunday we (my family and I) went to my dad’s friend John’s house, where we ate salsa and appetizers and all kinds of other food. I was going to swim, but I decided against it since I was still pretty exhausted from the night before. Probably the result of coming off of a major caffeine high.

Today (yesterdayby the time I post this, or in other words Monday) I didn’t do anythng major except see the movie The Day After Tomorrow. Oh, and John and his family and a few friends of his came over and we all had biscuits and gravy made by my mom. She rocks at cooking.

And now you’re caught up. Was there anything especially philisophical or enlightening here? No, but maybe next time. Right now, I must fall into bed.

“Can we just stop stopping so that we can go!” - Me, in Wal-Mart (of all forsaken, hellish places), struggling with a heavy hammock that I had to rest on the floor each time my mom would stop to look at something, which was about 20 times.